Finding yourself and your success in the all encompassing present
If you were born anywhere in any station except exultant royalty in any year in the first millennia A.D., your life and knowledge of the workings of the most basic of physical systems would be the same as someone born hundreds of years BOTH before and after you.
However, in just two generations’ time from my grandfather to me, we have seen the invention of two universal computing machines (both classical and quantum computers), a formulaic understanding of material, information, and computation, and machines that can detect light and shadow from distant sun-planet systems, the distinct qualities of particles after hadron collision, and the waves of gravity caused by distant black hole collisions. We stand on the cusp of creating superintelligent machines, living on other planets and in interstellar space, and having an abundance of clean energy, asteroid minerals, lab-grown food, automated labor, and instantaneous information.
This handful of generations will be the last to truly know a time where our knowledge of existence was not advancing at an exponential rate. We are at an inflection point in our growth of knowledge where before us there was not a critical mass of sound explanation or technological sophistication or resourcing capability, but after us, decisions will come with greater artificial intelligence and have both a more granular and more global understanding, a more dynamic knowledge graph of cause and predicted effects.
It has always been difficult for humans to understand their own time, especially when it is one of extreme dynamism. This has never been more true than now. The comprehensibility of the universe, coupled with our knowledge of, and ability to construct universal computers and machines, is only bounded by the Laws of Physics, a bound which allows for a near-infinite set of possibilities.
And most of this possibility—possibility our generations will create—is positive! Abudance in clean air, water, and food, the elimination of toil for resources, decisions made not by the body politic but scientifically are being researched NOW. Utopias never free from worry, but monitored and controlled to recognize chronic and acute issues and intelligently target resources and research to understand and overcome the existential, species-ending filters encountered now—before we get our collective shit together around species-based global scientific decision making—will be the most pressing, even if they are not the most difficult. All of the problems of species survival are tenable, now given our level of scientific understanding—what matters is if we can continue to place one foot in front of the other politically to overcome tribalism and myopia, all while chewing gum and resourcing scientific advances in abundance in human survival factors (air, water, food), luxuries (automated labor, free information), and the exploration and settling of lunar, extraterrestrial, near-earth orbital, and other habitats.
We can do it! We are a social organism that only needs casual reminders (like the ones in this Substack) that human love and connection is worth propagating. We are a creative and caring species that can overcome our genetic predispositions to conquer to instead love and understand and experience. We live in the most interesting and advanced time in human history… it also happens to be the most moral, compassionate, and caring. If your identity were shrouded in a veil of ignorance of your ability, race, class, sexuality, gender-identity, etc. and you were required to choose a time in human history to live, the present would be the objective optimal choice. This vector has only continued to improve and it is available to us to choose how the future progresses, for we are not ignorant of our biology or the sociology that imparts both distinction and collectivism on each of us and gives us our role to play in the present and for posterity.
We can do it! Problems exist, but problems are solvable. Both controlled, deterministic, and dynamic problems can be understood and solutions derived. We can write the story of posterity as we work through the exponentiation in knowledge where web 2.0 runs for only 10 years before web 3.0 and that will be a small fraction of the change from when quantum computers are programmed by as many people as work on classical ones. The time to change the future for the optimal, custom well-being is now!
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